A Student's Dictionary of Language and Linguistics

Larry Trask

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317859154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The terminology used in linguistics can be confusing for those encountering the subject for the first time. This dictionary provides accessible and authoritative explanations of the terms and concepts currently in use in all the major areas of language and linguistics, (pronunciation, word structure, sentence structure, meaning) as well as in the study of the social, anthropological, psychological and neurological aspects of language. Entries are clear and unambiguous, and helpful examples are used to clarify where appropriate. Particular attention is given to the terminology of traditional grammar. There are entries for the names of major language families, and there are also brief biographical entries for the major figures in the field, past and present. An extensive cross-referencing system makes the book easy to use: an invaluable annotated bibliography of texts on linguistics makes it an ideal guide for everyone beginning the study of language and linguistics.

C

C A symbol for consonant in phonology.

CA An abbreviation for any of componential analysis, conversation analysis or contrastive analysis.

cacophony Harsh or unpleasant sounds.

Caddoan A small family of languages in the western USA. Caddoan languages are remarkable for their small phoneme inventories and complex morphophonology.

caesura A pause or break within a line of verse: To err is human,//to forgive, divine.

call Any one of the vocal signals used by some species of animal to which a consistent meaning is attached. Most species have only three to six such calls, though vervet monkeys have over twenty.

CALL A short form for computer-assisted language learning.

calligraphy The art of beautiful handwriting.

calque (also loan translation) A word or phrase constructed by using a word or phrase in another language as a model and translating it piece by piece. For example, the Ancient Greek word for ‘sympathy’ or ‘compassion’ was sympathia, formed from syn ‘with’ and pathia ‘suffering’. The Romans calqued this Greek word into Latin as compassio, from con ‘with’ and passio ‘suffering’. German has in turn calqued the Latin word as Mitleid, from mit ‘with’ and Leid ‘suffering’, ‘grief’. If we were to calque one of these into English, we would get something like *withgrief; in fact, of course, we have simply borrowed the Greek and Latin words. Calques are rare in English, but we have a few, such as it goes without saying, calqued on French il va sans dire. Some other languages make heavy use of calques.

canonical form The most typical or most general pattern for the linguistic items in some class. In some languages, for example, the canonical form of syllables is CV(C).

canonical sentoid strategy A processing strategy, used by speakers of languages with fixed word order and little morphological marking, in which the first string of words that could possibly be a sentence is assumed to be a sentence. It is this strategy that makes garden-path sentences like The horse shot from the stable fell down so difficult to process, since the hearer assumes that The horse shot from the stable is a sentence and is left floundering.

cant Another word for argot.

Cantonese The variety of Chinese spoken in southeastern China, including the city of Canton and the territory of Hong Kong. Cantonese is also widely spoken by Chinese in southeast Asia, and is the variety spoken by most Chinese in Britain and the USA.

CAP See control agreement principle.

cardinal numeral A counting number like one, two, three, or twenty-seven. Compare ordinal numeral.

cardinal vowels A certain set of arbitrarily chosen vowel sounds. Arranged in a kind of grid, the cardinal vowels serve as points of reference for identifying real vowels in actual languages, in roughly the same way that lines of latitude and longitude serve as points of reference on a map.

caregiver speech (also motherese, child-directed language) The type of speech used by adults in addressing small children for whom they are responsible.

Carnap, Rudolf A German philosopher (1891–1970), a leading exponent of logical positivism and one of the developers of truth-conditional semantics.

case Any one of the forms which a noun or a noun phrase may assume in order to represent its grammatical or semantic relation to the rest of the sentence. For example, the Turkish noun ev ‘house’ has several case forms: Nominative ev (subject), Definite Accusative evi (direct object), Dative eve ‘to the house’, Locative evde ‘in the house’, Ablative evden ‘out of the house’ and Genitive evin ‘of the house’. Some languages have dozens of cases; others have none at all.

Case In Government-and-Binding Theory, one of a set of abstract properties assigned to noun phrases to mark their position within the structure of a sentence.

case grammar An approach to grammatical description which is based on a set of semantic roles (“deep cases”) like Agent, Patient, Experiencer, Beneficiary, Location and Goal.

Case theory In Government-and-Binding Theory, the module which deals with the principles governing the assignment of Case.

Catalan A Romance language spoken in eastern Spain (including Barcelona) and in a small area of southern France.

cataphor A label sometimes applied to an anaphor which precedes its antecedent. In the obvious reading of After she got up, Lisa had a shower, she is a cataphor referring to Lisa. This term is rarely used today.

categorical perception of speech The marked tendency of speakers to hear speech sounds, or at least consonants, as belonging definitely to the particular phonemes of their language. For example, any synthetic sound lying between [ba] and [da] in its acoustic characteristics will be heard either as [ba] or as [da], with nothing in between.

categorial grammar A particular theory of grammar which is formulated in terms of a small number of basic categories, a larger number of derived categories which are defined in terms of the basic ones, and a set of rules for combining these categories into syntactic structures. For example, if Sentence (S) and Noun (N) are taken as the basic categories, then an intransitive verb is (S/N), meaning that it combines with a noun to produce a sentence, while a transitive verb is ((S/N)/N), meaning that it combines with a noun to produce an intransitive verb.

category Any class of linguistic objects having properties in common. See especially syntactic category and grammatical category.

catenative verb Another name for a control verb.

CAT scanner A sophisticated type of X-ray machine which can map the soft tissues of the body in detail by photographing a series of thin slices through the body. Neurolinguists use it to map the brains of subjects. The initials stand for computerized axial tomography.

Caucasian A group of about 38 languages spoken in and near the Caucasus mountains. There are two northern groups, Northeast Caucasian and Northwest Caucasian, which are possibly (but not certainly) related, plus a southern (or Kartvelian) group, which does not appear to be related to the others. Some Caucasian languages have huge numbers of consonants and very few vowels (the extinct Ubykh had 80 and two, respectively). The best-known Caucasian language is the Kartvelian language Georgian.

causative A construction which expresses the notion “make somebody do something”. The sentence I washed the car has a corresponding causative Lisa made me wash the car.

Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca An Italian-born American geneticist (1922– ), who has claimed to have found important correlations between genes and languages in a number of populations, most notably in the Americas. Though deeply controversial, his work has been interpreted as providing evidence for ancient movements of peoples.

cavity Any identifiable open space, especially in the vocal tract, such as the oral cavity or the nasal cavity.

Caxton, William An English merchant (1415–91), the first person to print books in English and a major figure in the standardization of English. He was also a distinguished translator and language teacher.

c-command A particular relation which may hold between two nodes in a tree structure. A particu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes to the Reader
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• Q
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• X
• Y
• Z
• Further Reading